A week ago, I spoke with Rob Arthur the director of the film FRAMPTON which premieres tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Rob is a filmmaker and Frampton’s long time musical director; He has been filming the goings on for years and when Peter announced his “final” tour he decided to film that. Then things happened and the film became something more, such as a look at the whole of Frampton’s life, It’s a great film and only second time in 16 Tribeca’s where I got a ticket for the public screening because I liked it so much when I saw the press screening, The other was the Monty Python Doc. I told this to Rob and he was absolutely delighted.
I had ten minutes to ask questions. I could have gone on for hours but both Rob and I understood we were pressed for time and we spoke fast and did not allow ourselves to wander. (seriously I had slightly over 10-minute total from the minute they picked up the phone)
I think what follows will give you a little insight into the film and how it came together.
I want to take this opportunity to than everyone at Katrina Wan PR for helping arrange this and I want than Rob Arthur for taking time out to talk to this crazy correspondent about his great film and labor of love.
STEVE: Hi Rob, I love the movie It's absolutely fantastic. It's the only the second time in 17 Tribecas where I saw a film pre-festival and then I bought a ticket to see it again. The previous one was for a Monty Python doc.
First question is how did you decide to go from just making a document the the final tour to becoming a whole history of Peter Frampton?
ROB: So we have been making films together for a while. I've made a bunch of his music videos, social media video work and stuff. We spent a lot of time with cameras doing things ourselves. We have this company called Phoenix features where we like to make visuals aside from music.
Anyway, we're going on this world tour. And the thought was let's just document backstage and the road stories that go with it You know, that was the initial thing But you know, he has this disease call IBM and that was what the impetus for calling it The FinalTour. It was Hey folks, you know, this is this is for real. My health is going down.
Well, then things started happening on the road. He broke his foot and he didn't realize that he's walking on foot for like two weeks. All kinds of things were happening, you know, he'd fall or something and It was pretty intense and it was like wait a minute... That was kind of impetus for us to get the entire Peter Frampton story told.
STEVE: Did anybody say no when you asked them to be interviewed? I can’t imagine it. Everyone seems to love him.
ROB: That's what I'm saying.
This is a very quick story, but I love telling this story I was in Starbucks and in line and I look behind me and it's John Waite, the singer, right? And I've never met John Waite. I'm like, that's him. So I get my coffee.I go sit down. Andtrthen he gets his coffee. I'm looking at him and he starts walking straight over to me. He asks me "Who are you?" I go, "what do you mean? I said I play keyboards with Peter Frampton." He goes "Oh, so you're a real musician" and he sat down. So that that tells you what Peter's reputation is around Rock'n'roll. You know people really respect him and he's got people love him, who know him. So it was simple to get all these people.. Ringo who gets Ringo Starr to be in their film? You know, come on.
STEVE:No, it's just it's wild because I've never heard a bad word about him So it's just everybody always has these great stories about him.
ROB: He's a very proper English guy, you know, he's very polite But he's also funny and goofy and you know very very talented and kind of shy all these things are you kind of see that in this personality.
STEVE: How much how much archival material did you have? It seems like every moment of his whole his life was filmed and you had access.
ROB: By him, all that stuff with Humble Pie and stay at holiday ends and all that stuff was shot by him. That thing is it has never been seen before, ever. When we started making the film we got the budget together and everything He goes, hey, I got some hard drives of some old family footage if you want to see if there's anything you can use. I'm like are you shitting me? This is Rock history, you know Unbelievable.
STEVE: How many hours of material was there?And how did you decide to cut it down?
ROB: There's so much, you know. How you cut it down is you got to make sure that the story stays compelling and images used to go with what's being said. That's part of the documentary trick is to make it seem like the the spoken word that's happening is being reflected exactly in the action. It was these are all silent films. What we did was we would say okay. He's talking about Feeling lonely. So you show a picture of him walking on the beach or something. There's so much more that we could have used. It just didn't fit the story. Yeah, it was great it was it was a huge gift using that.
STEVE: How long did it take you to cut it together?
ROB: Over a year and a half probably. But I had been making edits of this thing for the last six years. you know before we even got financed. I had all kinds of stuff cut together on my own just my own material before we had any kind of money, so I've been practicing these scenes for a while in my editing program and it just got better when we got a budget and we had these interviews to make these stories come together.
STEVE: This is your first feature?
ROB: Yeah.
STEVE: Are you gonna do more features? I see a lot of documentaries and there's an ease ...s a it's just so nicely put together. You just fall into it and just go. The way you directed it and edited is beautiful.
ROB: Thank you so much We had really good people Mark Staunton was killer as an editor he did a fantastic job. I also had help with the story structure and by this guy Ralph Chapman. Ralph Chapman's out of Canada and he's done a lot of liner notes for a lot of rock records and he's worked on a lot of rock and roll docs. So he was hugely helpful in helping me. I basically had a four-hour film and he helped me kind of go "now hese are the most important parts. Let's put these together this way" So he was part of it. I feel like I have a sense of how to keep it interesting. Just enough of foreshadowing here and there. One of the things I really liked was not exposing his disease at the beginning. Anybody who doesn't know about it you have to wait till the end kind of figure out what's what's actually going wrong with him, you know.
That device was stolen from the movie Thelonious Monk Straight No Chaser I took it straight out of that "What is wrong with this guy?"I didn't know until the end.
STEVE: What's the what's the deal with the film now? Where are you going with this? Is this going straight to streaming or if it was going to have a theatrical run?
ROB: Nothing is finalized yet. If all of the above happens, that would be so fun I would love to see it in a theater with people. I love people to see it It's a rock and roll film and I'm really proud of the sound of this film. I mixed the shit out of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment